Ebola hops on a plane to Lagos — and could have continued on

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Remember the panic caused by SARS, which had Canadians lining up to be vaccinated?

More than 8,200 people contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome, which spread from China around the world, including Canada. Of these, 775 died, a 9.6% fatality rate.

Now there’s Ebola virus disease, which kills up to 90% of those unfortunate enough to catch it. It’s endemic in sub-Saharan Africa, where it usually kills a few people annually, usually in remote areas. Few people outside Africa ever get it.

This year, though, could be different.

The latest outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever is the worst-ever, spreading from Guinea to neighbouring Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, all poor nations, with struggling health-care systems. It’s infected 1,050 people, many of them city dwellers, rather than in the bush.

So far, 632 have died — a 70% kill rate. Hospitals and clinics are overwhelmed, despite the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses, and authorities have so failed to contain the spread of the disease.

The consequences could be dire for the rest of the world. Last week, the virus took a plane ride to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city— and could so easily have continued on to the U.S., reports The Daily Telegraph’sRosa Prince.

An Ebola victim who was allowed to board an international flight was an American citizen on his way home to the United States[.] Patrick Sawyer worked for the Liberian government and was visiting his sister there when he developed symptoms while on a plane to Nigeria. He was quarantined on arrival in Lagos and died on Friday.

His wife, Decontee, 34, who like Mr. Sawyer is originally from Liberia, currently at the heart of the terrifying Ebola outbreak, said he had been due to travel on to America where he could have become Patient Zero in a U.S. epidemic.

Mr. Sawyer took two flights to get to Nigeria from Liberia, where he had attended his sister’s funeral. The first took him from Monrovia to Lomé in Togo, where he boarded a plane to Lagos.

At the BBC, Farai Sevenzo says the latest Ebola outbreak represents a far more invidious threat to millions than other pandemics Africa has faced.

The unknown nature and resilience of the virus is currently stretching healthcare services in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and leading to the kind of drama only absolute fear propels. Those infected sometimes mysteriously disappear from treatment centres in an effort to delay the inevitable and find their own means to prolong their lives.

Knowing the infectious nature of this frightening virus, the authorities in Sierra Leone’s capital took to the radio to urge the public to find a runaway lest any more citizens be infected …

Porous borders and the informal manner in which communities hop across borders for commercial and family ties, and mountainous and inaccessible villages burying their dead unaware that coming into contact with corpses may leave many open to the haemorrhagic fever infection, are all adding to the crisis.

For Anthony Kamara Jr. writing in the New Rising Sun in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the news is a wakeup call.

I had assumed that the disease could easily be contained and our health authorities have the resources and expertise needed to contain it. In fact, I was wrong! I was completely wrong after I began to understand the severity of the disease and its consequences.

Given the number of confirmed deaths in the country and reports that the only Sierra Leonean doctor … with the requisite expertise that the country has known and has led the fight to defeat Ebola, has himself fallen victim to the disease, it is clear all hands are needed to avoid exacerbating the already ugly situation.

At the Daily Independent in Lagos, Sola Ogunmosunle calls the news a “terrifying development.”

The virus is “out of control” and spreading rapidly across the West African coast like a wild harmattan fire, with the World Health Organization recording 44 new infections and 21 deaths in just two days. The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa is the worst on record …

In a country where management of emergencies and disasters is lethargic, a nation where healthcare facilities and personnel are grossly inadequate and doctors’ strike incessant, the possibility of coping with an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus disease will, no doubt, be a very difficult national yoke. Nigeria remains one of five countries in the world still grappling with the eradication of polio, even with readily available vaccination.

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